


Somewhere Between

by damnslippyplanet



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Emotional Idiots In Love, M/M, When Tumblr Prompts Get Out Of Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 01:36:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6065788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Or: What Tumblr Has Decided Should Just Be Called The Postshower Fic And, Fine, I Can't Argue With That.)</p><p>Or, in which the following prompt took on a life of its own: <i>I want to see Will getting out of the shower with only a towel around his waist and trying to walk carefully to his bedroom. As he’s turning the corner, he walks straight into Hannibal and gets Hannibal’s outfit wet. Hannibal is stunned at first, but then gets lost at the sight of Will in a towel, admiring every inch of his body. Will blushes at first, but then he apologizes for the accident and walks inside his room closing the door behind him, leaving a damp, confused and aroused Hannibal in the hallway.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere Between

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Somewhere Between 中间地带](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6281797) by [ElisaDay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElisaDay/pseuds/ElisaDay)



> So this was supposed to be a tiny one-shot and then Tumblr was a bad influence on me and it became a six-shot spread over a few weeks and assorted Tumblr posts, and because of that I'm rather afraid it's on the choppy side and there are things I'd do differently now that I know where it ends up. But I've decided to just post as-is so I can get back to my other ongoing things instead of tidying this one up further. Let's pretend its rough-draft-ness is part of its charm. So please forgive lack of transitions, etc. and just enjoy your Feelings With a Side of Mild Smut. If you wish to read it as originally posted complete with my increasingly frantic ramblings about _why won't they just get to the smut already?_ you can find the original posts like so: [Part One](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/138698469546/sirenja-and-the-stag-hannigram-palace-i-need), [Two](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/138823400171/the-postshower-fic-isnot-doing-it-for-me-as-a), [Three](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/139047771796/so-i-was-thinking-about-my-poor-sad-anon-wanting), [Four](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/139416155156/somewhere-between-pt-4), [Five](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/139537837666/somewhere-between-pt-5), and then the sixth part only lives here.

> _Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse._ ~Jeanette Winterson, _The Passion_

Hannibal rounds the corner carrying the vase carefully; he’s perhaps overfilled it a little, but lilies tend to be thirsty flowers. Limited in quantity of floral arrangements due to Will’s obstinacy about changing their habits, he makes up for it with drama in the few he’s allowed.

Which is probably why he doesn’t see Will coming down the hallway, with his vision obscured by the large spray of colorful flowers, until he gets a sudden whiff of soap and clean skin and by then it’s too late - the collision’s only a breath away, too late to adjust. He tries anyway, with a sidestep that only means when they crash, the vase spills backwards onto Hannibal instead of Will, water soaking his shirt (no vest, another concession) and there’s a thump as the heavy glass vase crashes to the carpet.

Will nearly goes toppling, pressed for a moment against Hannibal and then stepping back as if the brief touch hurt him. Like he’s accidentally brushed against a hot stove.  He stands wide-eyed, clad in a towel wrapped low and loose around his hips with another in his hands that he seems to have been using to dry his damp curls.

Will’s as perfectly posed in that moment as any statue in any gallery Hannibal’s ever been to, an effect only slightly ruined when he says, “Shit! I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. Shit. You want this?”

He holds out the towel in his hand to Hannibal, who’s vaguely aware that he’s taking it (and that it’s half-wet and going to do him only a little bit of good), but it’s all muscle memory and very little conscious thought. What conscious thought Hannibal has at the moment is spinning in some sort of useless little circle in his brain, trying to figure out why he hasn’t really _looked_ at Will in the weeks they’ve been here.

He’s looked, but only with forewarning. Knowing it’s time to check Will’s stitches, he’s been careful to put himself into a clinical headspace and just attend to the square inches of skin under his hands. He hasn’t really thought - maybe hasn’t let himself think - about Will as a whole, breathing, living _(perfect, he’s perfect, how is he not in a museum?)_ man in that particular way.

Maybe he’d told himself he wasn’t _interested_ in that particular way. Above all that. His interests in Will intellectual and emotional, something close to spiritual, but not necessarily carnal. A man of many appetites doesn’t necessarily need to sate all of them to be well satisfied.

Apparently all it took was a misstep and a carelessly-tied towel to make him realize he’s not actually above all that at all.

He vaguely hears himself say “Thank you. Don’t concern yourself, it’s just water,” on auto-pilot. Anything to occupy his tongue so it can’t say w _hat on earth have we been waiting for, please let me follow to your bedroom, or just take a step back from the mess on the floor and I’ll go to my knees right now._ So he can’t just start licking water off the smooth nearly-hairless planes of Will’s chest, where small water droplets cling in fascinating, mesmerizing ways.

He zones for a moment there, experiencing a pang that he honestly could not classify as sexual or aesthetic if he tried - maybe he’s lost hold of the difference, maybe there never was one - as one of those droplets starts a slow track down Will’s torso, down and down and…

Apparently when Will blushes it’s a full-body experience, something Hannibal becomes aware of only when he realizes that Will’s scar is suddenly standing out in sharper relief as the rest of his skin flushes. His tentative query of, “…Hannibal?  What…?” makes Hannibal wonder just how long he’s been staring.

He suspects he’d rather not know. Hannibal doesn’t really experience embarrassment, but maybe he’s happier not knowing just how close he can get to it.

He does his best to pull himself back together. He pats ineffectually at himself with Will’s towel and hands it back to him with another “Thank you,” taking great pains not to let their hands touch. He has a sudden feeling any contact right now would give too much away that he’s just become aware of himself.

Just to have something to do, he kneels down and starts to pick up the stray stems that spilled from the vase. He does not, _does not_ look up, does not try to gauge whether Will shares any of Hannibal’s sudden vibrating awareness of their relative positions. How easily he could reach out and place hands on Will’s hips, just above that damn towel, maybe dipping just inside it, how he could pull the man one step toward him, how Will would complain about stepping on the sodden mess of the carpet, how quickly Hannibal would make him forget about that entirely….

He’s almost relieved when Will steps far enough away to ruin that particular fantasy that’s suddenly arrived full-blown and in Technicolor in Hannibal’s mind.  Saved from himself when the man mumbles something about, “Um, I can help you with that if you want. Just give me a minute to throw on some pants.”

He manages to say, “Don’t worry about it, it’ll just take a minute to clean up. I’ll have it taken care of by the time you get dressed. Go ahead.”

He doesn’t look up from the carpet until he sees Will turn away.  But he does look, he can’t seem to help looking, once Will does. The man’s bare shoulderblades look like knives or wings, like something Hannibal could hurl himself against and not even mind when they cut him or lifted him out of his own skin.

One of Hannibal’s hands uncurls and rubs mindlessly against his own leg, and it’s nothing like he suddenly knows touching Will’s bare, damp skin would be. He’s suddenly violently hard and it _feels_ violent, violent and tender and uncertain all at once in a tangle of emotions that he’s never felt in this particular combination before. Or maybe only once before, followed by a brutal, nearly-unsurvivable fall.

He’s not sure this is going to end any differently, really.

The door closes behind Will.

Hannibal’s left on his knees in the hallway, amid the mess of his ruined floral arrangement about which he suddenly cares not at all. He’s damp from chest to toes and he can’t tell whether he’s actually trembling or whether it just feels like he is.

Something’s been spilled and destroyed in this hallway in the last five minutes and he’s not at all sure it’s the flowers. He’s just figured out that he’s human after all, apparently. Suddenly, achingly, human.

What an odd way to realize it.

How Bedelia would laugh.

He wonders if Will knows, or if he’ll be the very last to find out Hannibal’s got a human heart after all.  He wonders how long he can keep the secret, or if he even wants to try.

* * *

 

Will Graham’s hands are becoming a problem for Hannibal.

Or perhaps if one wished to be accurate, one might say that Hannibal’s _awareness_ of Will’s hands is becoming a problem for him. _By all means,_ he thinks with a frustration that echoes even in his own mental voice, _let us have accuracy while I am going slowly insane.  Or more insane. And not all that slowly._

He can vaguely remember, if he thinks about it, that Will’s always been _tactile._ Not with people; he can barely recall Will ever initiating human contact with anyone in Hannibal’s presence.  But Will’s restless pacing around his office had always come with a large helping of fidgeting.  Touching things. Running fingers along bookcases or the backs of chairs, picking up things on Hannibal’s desk and putting them down again absently and never quite in the right place.  It’s a miracle he hadn’t contaminated more crime scenes that way, actually.

Hannibal thinks he might even have made a note about it in Will’s case file once.  Something along the lines of _appears to seek physical contact with his surroundings as a method of self-grounding when particularly anxious or concerned._  If not those exact words, something similarly bland and bloodless. He’d been interested in the anxiety, not the hands.

Were he writing the notes now, they might say something like _has a tendency to splay fingers wide and flat against surfaces even when he’s sitting still - tables, chair arms, a tree the other day. Or rubs his hand absently against his own stubble, displaying the naked band of skin where his wedding ring used to be. His therapist is no longer clear on whether it’s a grounding method, some sort of sensory seeking, or a grasp at balance. His therapist also feels unbalanced. His therapist has never felt envious of a tree before._

At this particular moment, Hannibal’s problem is that Will’s hand is at his waist. Just barely.  He’s probably done it a dozen times before and it never registered at all, but something’s shifted in Hannibal’s marrow and he can’t seem to shift it back.  Or perhaps doesn’t really want to.  

And so, yes, it may have happened a dozen times before, Will brushing past him to reach for a glass from the kitchen cupboard while Hannibal’s hands are occupied with cooking and unable to reach it for him.  It’s probably far from the first time Will’s touched him lightly with an apologetic “Coming up behind you, look out.”  But it registers now in a way it hasn’t before. It jolts him far more than it should, and he can only hope any physical response that Will might notice registers as a startle response and nothing more.

Hannibal nearly loses a finger to a slip of the knife as every nerve in its body reroutes itself to sense Will’s presence close behind him.  He saves the finger but loses a chunk of the ginger he’d been slicing thin, as it goes spinning out across the countertop and onto the floor. Never mind. Hannibal will consider himself lucky if a bit of ginger root and some lilies end up being the only casualties of whatever is happening to him.

Will has his glass and is gone again before Hannibal can even begin to process his proximity in any conscious way other than that live-wire awareness playing out on some far more primitive level than consciousness. Hannibal tries not to follow Will with his eyes as he crosses back to the other side of the kitchen for a drink of water.  He tries not to observe the line of Will’s throat as he gulps it down.  He tries and fails miserably and then glares down at his cutting board because that movement of the muscles of Will’s jaw is one more thing he didn’t need to see or think about.

This was complicated enough already, this tentative accord between them and their histories of mutual injury, without adding this into the mix. He’d take it back if he could.

That’s a lie.

It’s a lie and Hannibal may lie to everyone else in the world (although he prefers the half-truth and the insinuation), but he rarely lies to himself.

He would not take this back.

Whatever it is and however impossible it is, it’s an entirely new sensation and Hannibal is not someone who turns away from new sensations.  Especially ones that light up and liquefy his insides like this. He’ll observe his own weakness and he’ll take whatever pleasure and pain there is to be found in it, and he’ll master it, and then he’ll shut it away in his memory to be examined there and only there.

Will doesn’t need to know.  He may stay, if he never knows, and that will be enough. Probably, that will be enough.

It needs to be enough.

* * *

The piano’s no harpsichord, or even as good a piano as one might wish, but Hannibal finds himself increasingly drawn to it as the days roll by. Words are dangerous. Eyes are dangerous. Music feels like a safe harbor; a language Will doesn’t speak except in the most casual way. Hannibal can be as emotive as he wants to at the piano.

He takes to playing in the mornings after breakfast, day after day until his fingers regain most of the muscle memory lost in the years he waited behind institutional walls. Alana had been, he will freely admit, reasonably generous with his accommodations under the circumstances, if only to placate him. But a piano was never on the table for him, other than in his memories.

Slowly it comes back, though. He plays Bach. He plays Schubert. (The _Ständchen_ , and if he has a particular face in his mind’s eye as he pours out the yearning in it, well. That’s between Hannibal and the piano.) He thinks about writing something new, but he’s too unsettled for composition.

The first few days, Will stays away. Perhaps it’s a courtesy, as Hannibal relearns the feel of the keys, and the unused small muscles in his hands that need to be reminded how to stretch and dance the way they must for this. He hits more wrong notes than he’d like and he’s grateful that Will at least pretends not to be listening.

The fourth day, Will sits on the staircase out of sight and listens. As if Hannibal wouldn’t know. As if he’s not always entirely, uncomfortably aware of where Will is. Not to mention, Will’s just come in from a run and he can smell sweat and sunlight and warm skin. But if Will wants to hide, then let him hide. Hannibal plays some Chopin for his hidden audience and manages to hold him for several minutes until Will finally goes to take a shower.

Hannibal continues playing alone and does not think about Will in the shower. Or after the shower. Or, for that matter, bent over the piano.

He gives up for the day after striking several wrong notes in a row.

On the sixth day, Will emerges from hiding to lean against the door frame and listen. He’s taken his post-run shower first this time and his hair is still wet. Hannibal plays him some Debussy, the Arabesques and the Valse romantique. Will closes his eyes and listens carefully, and Hannibal would like to know just what he’s hearing. He doesn’t get any hint; when the music ends, Will just opens those too-piercing-by-half eyes again and looks at Hannibal for a long moment before saying “Thank you for the concert,” and slipping away out of the room.

The day after that, Hannibal comes into the living room to find Will’s skipped or at least postponed his morning run in favor of curling up in the heavy armchair with their tablet. Hannibal assumes he’s catching up with the latest lurid Tattle Crime headlines. He pauses in the doorway to ask, “Will it disturb you if I play?”

Will has the sweetest smile when he chooses to deploy it; it pierces Hannibal through that heart he’s still surprised to find is human. For an answer, he asks, “Do you mind if I stay?”

“Not at all.” _Please. Please stay._

Hannibal takes a moment to reconsider his selections for the morning. Bach, mostly. He plays, and Will listens, a quiet but attentive audience. He ends up playing longer than he’d intended to for the pleasure of keeping Will there with him, but he can’t keep playing forever and eventually his fingers trail to a halt.

He hasn’t let himself turn to see if Will is still there, but now he does, and Will is watching him again, still and thoughtful, tablet forgotten. He says, “Thank you. Again.”

Hannibal grasps for a conversational topic to keep Will in the room and comes up with, “Did you ever play any instruments?”

“The piano, a bit, but not nearly as well as you do. I thought I might take up other instruments someday, but I never did. There never seemed to be time.” A flicker of distress or perhaps just distaste, crosses Will’s features as he adds, “Other than my brief experience of playing a human cello.”

Hannibal still regrets not seeing that crime scene in person; he’d have liked to hear the sounds. Although when he says, “I would have liked to witness that,” he’s thinking more about the sight of Will playing the cello. Will’s hands. Will’s fevered eyes, all those years ago.

Maybe he lets too much of that slip through, because Will smiles an oddly knowing smile at him then. “Yes, I’m sure you would have.” He gets up to leave the room then, but pauses in the doorway and looks back at Hannibal, the piano, his armchair. Hannibal thinks he detects a note of something softer in his voice, something hesitant or perhaps questioning as he offers, “You know, usually I’m on the other side of this.”

Hannibal frowns, not entirely sure where this is going. “I’m not sure what you mean.“

Will doesn’t make things any clearer when he says, “I was thinking about the night I met Winston. Did I ever tell you I met the two of you in the same week?”

Hannibal’s still not entirely following, but he manages to say, “It must have been quite a week.”

“It was. Will you play for me again tomorrow?”

“Whenever you like.” Hannibal stays at the piano for a long time after Will leaves, ghosting fingers over keys he doesn’t actually press, considering what he’ll play for Will tomorrow and trying to understand what he meant about his dog.

* * *

Hannibal hadn’t quite realized how much time he was spending surreptitiously watching Will, until Will started watching him back.  The shift was imperceptible, but as recently as a few days ago he would look up and more often than not see Will’s dark head bent over a book, or find him gazing out the window or with his eyes closed, daydreaming, perhaps of dogs or rivers.

Will still does those things.  But also, now, he watches Hannibal like it’s his new hobby.  Or like Hannibal’s a puzzle to solve. Perhaps one he’s almost solved already, with just a few pieces left to slot into place.

Hannibal doesn’t know the cause of the shift and not knowing makes him uneasy.  Will’s silent, curious gaze makes him uneasy.  It makes him feel pinned down and displayed, like one of his own tableaus.  As if Will can see Hannibal’s messy, bloody heart in all its newly-discovered vulnerability.  

Hannibal, who averts his eyes from very few things, finds himself looking away.

There are other changes, equally small and equally unsettling.

Will’s been in charge of the morning coffee making for some time, but he usually leaves the coffee in the kitchen for Hannibal to retrieve at his leisure. The past several days, instead, he’s been bringing a mug to Hannibal wherever he’s taken up residence that morning.  It’s a quiet gesture. He just leaves the mug near Hannibal without disturbing his concentration on whatever he’s doing.  But it’s becoming a habit; Hannibal’s coming to expect it. Expectation is new.

They’re spending most of their time in and around the safe house, still a little gunshy about being seen in public more often than necessary. So when they need to resupply, one goes and the other stays home.  Will’s been straying from the list to bring home other things he knows Hannibal likes.  Hannibal’s not sure whether it’s new, or whether it’s been going on all along and he just wasn’t paying attention until now, when suddenly he’s paying attention to _everything_ Will does.  Not knowing is driving him crazy but he can’t think of a way to ask. Hesitancy is new, too.

Will’s still coming to listen to Hannibal play the piano most days after breakfast, postponing his run until later in the day.  That leaves him running during the hottest part of the day and it must be uncomfortable, but he doesn’t complain.  He just keeps attending what’s starting to feel like a series of command performances Hannibal is playing in a daily bid for Will’s attention.  Afterwards he says something kind and innocuous about the music, or asks a question about it, and then he’s off again for his run.

Hannibal tries, he really does, to find somewhere to be other than in the living room when Will returns from his run and passes by the open door on his way upstairs to shower and change.  He tries to be in the kitchen washing the last of the breakfast dishes, or up in his own bedroom web surfing for news of the manhunt for the two of them, or perhaps out in the garden.  These are all perfectly reasonable places to be.

And yet more often than not he finds himself in the living room trying not to be caught staring when Will returns.  He finds himself achingly aware that the sight of Will in his thin, sweat-soaked t-shirt is somehow more revealing than seeing him actually shirtless had been.  There’s something about the clinging fabric that makes Hannibal want to press his face between Will’s damp shoulders and just rest there, inhaling his singular scent. On more daring days, he imagines he might lap up the beads of sweat from the nape of Will’s neck instead. He imagines how the heat must rise from Will’s skin, as if he’s burning up from the inside once again.

Sometimes Will looks back at him before he goes up to shower, and Hannibal’s nearly certain that Will knows exactly what he’s thinking.  It’s that same look of consideration; neither an invitation nor a warning.  A question, maybe, but one Hannibal doesn’t understand well enough to answer.  

Maybe that’s what Will finally figures out, Hannibal’s uncertainty the last puzzle piece he needed.  Because it’s after one of those shared, unresolved _looks,_ twenty minutes or so later when Will’s back downstairs, showered and changed into regular clothes, on a day that doesn’t seem any different from any other day, that Will comes back into the living room and stands in the doorway as if he’s waiting for Hannibal’s attention.

As if he doesn’t already have it, always.

And then he says, with a gentleness that pierces as sharply as any knife, “You’re terrible at this, aren’t you?” He might mean any of a number of things, and Hannibal’s left in a rare moment of not knowing how to respond. Will takes pity on him and goes on: “Did I ever finish telling you about when I met Winston?”

Hannibal means to say, “No.”  Maybe he just thinks it.

Will runs a hand through his damp hair, which is half-dry and just beginning to curl again.  He focuses his gaze just slightly past Hannibal, the way he does when he’s remembering something.  “He wouldn’t come to me at first; whatever he’d been through before I found him, it must have left him suspicious.  I had to sit very still and give him treats one at a time. I threw them far away at first, and then a little closer, and a little closer until he let me touch him.  Then another one and another, and then finally he would eat out of my hand, so I could get him in the car and take him home with me.”

“I fail to understand–”

“I’m not done.”  Still gentle, but no-nonsense.  Hannibal doesn’t see where Will’s going with this but there’s clearly a point to it.  “It’s not as if you just get him home and everything’s fine.  It’s more of a process.  It takes some time. You have to win the dog’s trust.  He has to feel safe.  You keep giving him treats from your hand, when he’ll take them.  You talk to him as much as you can, calm and gentle. He has to learn the sound of your voice means _home._  You have to make the kind of home he wants to stay in. All the while he’s earning your trust, too - trust that he won’t bite or run away again, or hurt the rest of the pack.”  Will sighs, and the loss in the sound is palpable. “Winston was pretty easy. Wherever he came from, he was looking for a home. Sometimes they make it harder. _You’re_ making it harder.”

Hannibal bristles at that comparison: “I’m not one of your stray dogs, Will. And this actually _is_ my home.”

“No.  You’re not.”  Will’s moving, then, across the room, slow and steady as he might have for Winston.  “It’s easy to show dogs that I’m not scary, because I know what they’re scared of and how not to be that. But I can’t tell what you’re scared of.  You’re scared of something, though. Will you tell me what?”

Hannibal wants to say that he’s not scared.  He’s _concerned,_ maybe, that Will’s the one who might be too easily startled away.  That a wrong word or motion might set him fleeing.  If his voice worked Hannibal would say that he’s not scared but perhaps _aware_ that he has no idea how to share his home with another person after decades of solitude, even without the complicating factor of desperate one-sided need.  He wants to avoid this entire conversation. Instead he hears himself just saying Will’s name, with a helpless, hopeless note to it.

And maybe Will’s a little scared too, actually, because he has to visibly steel himself before he goes on.  “If you’re not going to tell me, I’m going to guess, because we can’t just keep doing whatever this is.  If I guess wrong, try not to stab me, okay?  Are you holding any sharp objects right now?”

It’s probably a joke. Hannibal’s almost certain it’s a joke. But with their history, you never know, so he holds up his hands; empty, but for the book he was holding and has laid aside.

Will’s lips twitch into a smile at that; maybe it was a joke.  He holds out a hand and says, “C’mere. Please.”  Hannibal doesn’t mean to go.  He doesn’t want to reinforce whatever ridiculous notion this is that’s possessed Will, that Hannibal’s one of his strays who needs taming.

But he stands up, and he goes just as readily as Winston or any of the others would have, and he tries not to analyze that too carefully. If he thought about it, he might stop moving.

He doesn’t want to stop moving, because when he gets close enough, Will lets him know with a hand on Hannibal’s shoulder that pauses him, and then pulls him just a little closer than that. He breathes, “Don’t be scared. And don’t stab me. I’m really tired of being stabbed.”

And then he kisses Hannibal and the world shudders to a halt.

* * *

 

Hannibal forgets sometimes that Will can be gentle.  That it was part of his appeal, long ago at the start.  How he’d appreciated the duality, enjoying that the same man who snapped so angrily at Hannibal and slipped so readily into the darkest spaces of killers’ minds could also care so deeply for his little family of strays, and buy Christmas gifts for Abigail, and apologize so sweetly and so unnecessarily for dragging Hannibal into darkness.

Those memories sometimes seem so long ago, and so overwritten by everything that happened since, that Hannibal simply and perhaps unforgivably forgets. He pictures Will snarling and blood-soaked, he thinks of Will at his dining table spinning him beautiful lies, he remembers Will promising him a reckoning.

He forgets that Will can also be _this._  

Hannibal would know what to do with violence.  He could meet fierceness with his own.  But he feels himself unravelling in the face of Will’s tenderness, the softness of his hand on the back of Hannibal’s neck, the way he breathes against Hannibal’s lips and explores but doesn’t push.  He doesn’t give Hannibal anything to push back against, and all Hannibal can do is melt into it.

It goes on for a long, breathless, speechless time.  There are mouths, and hands, Hannibal’s hands with minds of their own finding a home at Will’s waist, but not much more than that.  It’s just wordless questioning and answering, seeking and finding, call and response.  Heat and touch and wanting.

It’s almost too good to stop, or to plunge ahead, or to want anything else.

Almost.

When they break apart Hannibal finds he has to gasp for air, and that he doesn’t actually care that it’s undignified.  His fingers curl in Will’s shirt at his waist to keep him from stepping away again, and he’s not unaware that the motion also pulls the shirt up just enough to bare skin.  To bare, if he were looking, Will’s scar, tantalizingly close to where his fingertips skim.

He’s not looking. He wants to do more than skim the surface of Will. He wants to dive in.  He wants to eat Will alive and have him beg to be devoured again. He wants, and he wants, and how did he not _know_ any of this until so recently?  What else does he not know about himself?

Will’s hands are still gentle but his eyes are less so.  He looks a little more like the Will who wanted a reckoning, now.  There’s something just a little sharp in his expression, vindicated and pleased and heated.  His voice sounds much the same when he says, “See? Not so scary.”   He tightens the hand around the back of Hannibal’s neck just a little, just enough to press fingernails against Hannibal’s skin but not dig in.  “I _see_ you.  I see the way you look at me. I can’t live with you and have you looking at me like that every day and not do this any more.  So either you’re going to stop staring at me like that, or we’re going to do this. Okay?”

As if there’s even the sliver of a chance it might not be okay.  As if Hannibal’s not coming apart at the seams, with so little encouragement.

For some reason he isn’t quite sure of, Hannibal finds himself asking, “How long have you known?”  It couldn’t possibly matter less, but he needs to know.

“Longer than you, I’m pretty sure.  You’ve got some catching up to do, _doctor."_ Will purrs the last word and lets the nails resting lightly on Hannibal’s skin dig in properly, and something low in Hannibal’s belly clenches painfully and wonderfully.

 _Oh. There’s_ the friction Hannibal needed to push back against, both in the pinprick pain of Will’s touch, and the challenge in his voice. Enough talking, then.  

He dives back into Will and doesn’t skim along the surface of the waves this time; he lets his hands wander from Will’s waist, and he lets his tongue press Will’s mouth open. He tries to ignore the fact that the mouth in question has curved itself into a grin against his own, as if Will had been angling for this exact result.  He probably had been. He probably knows all the things that Hannibal doesn’t know about himself.  He’ll probably make Hannibal pay to learn them. Damnable creature.

Damnable perfect creature.

There might be some other universe where things had played out differently. A universe where this unfolded slowly over time - a kiss after dinner, a nervous conversation, a bit of foolish and pleasurable necking on another night.  Maybe in that universe one of them isn’t sure how this is supposed to go, how they might please each other. Maybe in that universe it takes weeks to actually to get the bedroom.

This isn’t that universe.  Will wants Hannibal to catch up, and Hannibal wants to eat Will’s heart or at least learn every inch of his skin and the full range of his voice.

It’s not even clear who drags who toward the bedrooms, only that they go, in a tangle of limbs and tongues and items of clothing strewn behind.  Hannibal hesitates for a moment at the top of the steps, wondering which room they should go to, but Will has that in hand too.  He tugs Hannibal toward his own room without a pause.

Hannibal wonders for an instant just how long Will’s been planning this and how thoroughly he’s thought it out, but he thinks better of asking.  So far, letting Will lead the way is getting Hannibal exactly where he wants to be. What’s the point of fighting a wave?  Especially when drowning feels like this.

So he lets Will pull them both over an irrevocable edge, one more time.

* * *

Something about stepping into Will’s room brings Hannibal up short for a moment.  He’s hardly ever been in that room since they moved in; they’ve been doing such a careful, polite dance around each other’s privacy and boundaries.  

He thinks for a moment of vampires and thresholds and invitations and innocents. Then he looks at Will standing just out of arm’s reach, flushed and tousled and entirely pleased with himself, and thinks in quick succession  _ there’s not a force in the world that could keep me away  _ and  _ there are no innocents in this room, _ and crosses through the doorway to find out what lies on the other side of politeness.

Will lost his shirt somewhere on the way to the room, and somehow, improbably, just one sock.  Hannibal’s slightly more dressed but then he had more layers to lose, and anyway it’s not his own clothing he’s most concerned about at the moment.  He’s seeing double - Will as he is right now, Will as he was a few paces away that afternoon in the hallway, glistening and flustered and nearly this close, but impossible to touch.  

Apparently it’s not impossible anymore.

He reaches out and oh god, Will  _ lets him, _ leans right into the heat of Hannibal’s hand running over the planes and curves of his chest and stomach. Fingertips brushing lightly over a nipple pull a pleased little sound from somewhere in Will’s chest that sets something in Hannibal alight.  The Wills in Hannibal’s vision blur and merge and are just one, a single and singular man in front of him, reaching out for him, working at Hannibal’s own buttons deftly.

Will has to move a little closer to do it, but he steps even closer than that.  Near enough to lean in and press a hot, damp kiss to Hannibal’s jaw and the vulnerable skin just underneath.  So close that Hannibal realizes with a full-body jolt that he knows what Will Graham wanting him  _ smells  _ like now, which just fucking breaks him.

The rest of the clothes can’t come off fast enough, and it turns into more or less a fight over who’s going to yank at which buttonszippersbelt, who’s going to shove who toward the bed.  Not that it was ever a real contest. There are about a hundred different ways this could play out, and assuming this is real and not some kind of fever dream, Hannibal hopes to be allowed the chance to try all of them at some point.   But this first, this maybe only, this possibly-hallucinated time, there’s no way this happens that doesn’t involve Hannibal’s mouth on as much of Will as he’s allowed.

So down Will goes, a hand flying out behind him to cushion the fall onto the bed that’s going to be tight quarters for two.  The impact jars a small  _ oof _ from him but he doesn’t seem to mind, just looks up at Hannibal with eyes blown dark and says, “You look like you want to eat my heart.”

_ Raw and bloody and hot in my hands, _ Hannibal thinks but doesn’t mean to say, except he  _ does _ say it because he’s lost control of this situation if he ever had it to begin with.

It’s the most appalling thing he could possibly have said. He thinks for a split second he’s ruined everything.  Except Will, unpredictable, maddening Will Graham, smiles that sweet, gentle smile at him again and licks his lower lip with a glimpse of his pink tongue that drives Hannibal slightly out of his mind and says,  _ "God. _  Of course you do. Come here.”

Hannibal goes. Of course he goes. What else would he ever do? 

It’s a very small bed, really, for two grown men.  They make it work.  

Hannibal tastes Will’s skin thoroughly, starting where his life pulses just beneath his skin at his throat and working his way down as slowly as he can stand to, which isn’t as slowly as he’d like.  Will moves for Hannibal, under and against and because of him.  Will doesn’t laugh or protest or flinch when Hannibal needs a moment to pause over the thin line of scar tissue twisting his abdomen.  He stills and the hand that had been clenched tight in Hannibal’s hair relaxes to a gentle caress instead as he says, “It’s all right. It’s all  _ right, _ Hannibal.  It was a long time ago. Don’t stop.”

So Hannibal doesn’t.  It’s as simple as that, apparently, after all these weeks of wanting and not having.  Now  _ Will  _ wants, and Hannibal wants to give him what he wants, and suddenly everything’s so simple that Hannibal could laugh or cry if he were the type of man to do either easily.  Instead he just tries to give Will what he wants, anything he wants. He’s out of practice and it’s not quite like riding a bicycle, but Hannibal’s determined and Will apparently quite likes giving directions, so they make this work, too. 

At some point Will’s words trail off into inarticulate sounds and his hands fall away to twist in the sheets.  But by then Hannibal’s found out most of what he likes so he can keep going without the direction. And does, struggling to breathe around Will filling his mouth and his hands and all his senses.  But maybe that’s fine.  Maybe breath is overrated. Maybe Hannibal’s obituary is going to list all his creations and crimes and end with  _ he died of asphyxiation while giving a blowjob to a man who’d tried to kill him a few weeks earlier.  _ It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, except that having come this far, Hannibal refuses to die without knowing what it looks like when Will loses his last shred of control.  So he seeks again with his tongue for that spot that seems to unravel Will, and finally Will breaks and shudders beautifully and lets go.  

He comes with Hannibal’s name on his lips, half-hiding his face with a hand because apparently  _ this _ is the moment where Will gets shy. That’s so delightful to learn that Hannibal suddenly doesn’t want to eat Will’s heart at all, or even particularly to get off himself.  He just wants to fold Will up in his arms and keep him there until he comes out of hiding and remembers how to use words other than Hannibal’s name.  And then he wants to drive the words away again, and find out if Will always hides when he falls apart, or if that was a one-time only new-lover performance.

The thought that he might be impossibly lucky enough to find out exactly that spurs him to climb back up the bed and stretch himself out next to Will, who makes an achingly sweet sound that’s not quite a word, more of an exhalation, and reaches to tangle himself up with Hannibal like some sort of clinging vine.  Like a missing part of himself trying to remember where it’s supposed to fit.

Hannibal thinks maybe they’re going to fall asleep like that and he wouldn’t object at all, but Will apparently has thoughts in his head if not actual words.  When he finishes draping himself where he wants to be, he’s ended up in a position to kiss his own taste from Hannibal’s mouth and to touch where Hannibal’s still hard, pressed between their stomachs.  Will’s pliant and languid with his own aftermath and when he works Hannibal it’s almost lazy, slow and teasing and not usually how Hannibal likes it, but it’s so good, and he’s so close already, that it takes so little for him to follow Will over the edge, clinging and shaking all the way down. 

Apparently Hannibal’s life now is following Will over one cliff’s-edge after another.  He thinks that might be a very fine way to spend a life, once he’s coherent enough again to think anything at all.

There are things to talk about, probably.  Almost certainly. What this meant and whether they’re going to do it again and whether they can possibly move to the bigger bed in Hannibal’s room next time if so.  Precisely when Will figured this out, and whether it would be presumptuous to add lubricant to their next shopping list, and whether Will’s done any of this with men before and whether he has any concerns about that, and probably a dozen other questions that Hannibal hasn’t even thought of yet.

But Will’s already half-asleep pinning Hannibal’s arm to the mattress, and while Hannibal’s not usually that guy who falls asleep after sex, he can sort of see the appeal at the moment.  He’s still not entirely sure what this is or whether it’s ever going to happen again, so if Will’s going to let this draw out a while longer, Hannibal’s not going to be the one to break the spell.

He shifts just enough in Will’s sprawling embrace to get into a comfortable enough position to stay in for a while, and then he closes his eyes and just...stays.  For as long as the impossible man in his arms will have him. He lies still and breathes as steadily as he can manage and hopes that will be a long, long time.


End file.
